Helen Mirren

Name: Helen Mirren
Born: 26 July 1945 (Age: 65)
Where: Ilford, England
Height: 5' 4"
Awards: Won 4 BAFTAs, 1 Oscar and 3 Golden Globes.

Many actresses have been considered sex symbols. Brigitte Bardot, Gina Lollobrigida and Jennifer Lopez are just a few to have been famed for setting male pulses racing. Far fewer have been considered hugely talented as well as super-sexy, Michelle Pfeiffer and Jessica Lange being just two capable of arousing both the body and the intellect. And no one has been considered super-sexy and hugely talented for quite as long as Helen Mirren. A wholly inflammatory character, she’s been one of the UK’s top thespians, a star of stage and screen, and a hot pin-up for over 40 years. Now past 60, she’s still up for the world’s most prestigious acting awards, and still being talked about in terms of her sexuality. Unbelievable.

And she’s an Essex girl. Kind of. Helen’s grandfather was Russian, Pyotr Vasielivich Mironov, an aristocrat connected to the military. The son of a countess and a senior military officer, he rose swiftly through the army's ranks. He came to London to buy arms to aid his countrymen in the Russo-Japanese war, living in luxury in the Russian embassy with his wife, Marusia and sending son Basil to a private school. He then founded himself stranded due to the Bolshevik revolution, leaving six sisters on the family estate at Gzhatsk, near Smolensk (Gzhatsk was in 1968 renamed Gagarin after cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, born in the nearby village of Klushino). During the revolution, the sisters would be forced to leave their home and live in a crammed flat in Moscow, the family losing their property and status forever and really only being saved from a sorry death by one of the sisters, Valentina, marrying a high-ranking communist official. Interestingly, given Helen's later career, Valentina would be a typist fro the great Stanislavsky. Forced to leave the Russia embassy and now jobless and homeless, Pyotr would take a job as a cab driver. The poverty and loss of status would take its toll, and he'd separate from Marusia in 1928.

And the family did have status. When, in later years, after the fall of the Soviet Union, Mirren and her sister Katherine did some research into their background, they found that they were descended from famed military dynasty the Kamenskys. Field Marshal Mikhail Kamensy had enjoyed success in the Russo-Turkish war of 1768-1774 and been awarded the Order of St George of the Second Class, the highest Russian military honour. In 1806 he'd be made Commander in Chief of the Russian army fighting Napoleon but, not up to the job, would be sacked the next year. Two years after that he'd be axed to death by a 15-year-old boy, the brother of one of Mikhail's young concubines. Mikhail's son Nikolay, meanwhile, was also a lauded general.